LETTING IT SLIDE

Jonrowe Finds Peace When Thrown
to the Dogs

By Chuck HoltonThe 700 Club

CBN.com 
They call it the world’s last great race –
the Iditarod. It is ten days of almost no sleep, pounding along
rugged mountain trails, chasing 16 sled dogs over frozen tundra.
It’s crossing slushy creek beds and struggling through blizzards
where the wind chill can drop to 100 ° below freezing. And
in the midst of it, one dog musher finds a peace that she gets
nowhere else.

"That has been my revival time, the time when I’ve
most enjoyed being able to be one-on-one with God, and that’s
when I have the least interferences in my life and the least distractions
taking me away from what it is that God is saying to me, what
He has created," Dee Dee Jonrowe says. "I have a better
chance to appreciate Him and an environment to talk to Him when
I’m out on the dogs."

Anyone who follows the sport of dog-sledding knows the name Dee
Dee Jonrowe. Her celebrity comes from having competed in more
than 20 Iditarod races – more than any other woman in history.
You’ve really made it when your face appears on a Taco Bell
collector's cup. This is no ordinary race: the Iditarod covers
more than 1,100 miles across Alaska’s frozen interior.

"Once you get out a ways and the team is more manageable,
then the dangers are more often terrain, coming down into the
Dalzells Gorge, for instance, trying to navigate some of the boulders
and trenches and stuff that we have. Another one, of course, is
moose on the trail, wild animals, bison over on the Fairwell Burn
area," she reports.

With threats like that, I had to know: Does Dee Dee have her
own gun?

"I do carry a handgun, and I’ve had to use it in training,"
she explains. "Fortunately, I haven’t had to use it
on the race. But you have to be prepared to take care of your
animals."

When it comes to the care of her team, this is one musher who
never lets things slide. I recently paid Dee Dee a visit to see
how she was preparing for this year’s Iditarod.

"They really enjoy what they are doing, so I think if you
think about it in terms of a kid, it would be more like doing
some kind of physical fitness, because this is what this is offering
these dogs, because they aren’t just stuffed toys. They
don’t want to just sit," she says.

Now tell me that’s not an understatement!

"I’ve always felt that our dogs were the best advocates
for their own profession," Dee Dee states. "I think
that in many cases, people maybe don’t understand. It’s
developing dogs to be the very best they were born to be, and
to me that’s just really exciting – to read their
behaviors, to see all of the intricate things that they were made
to do and think, and then to bring all those attributes together
and help them to focus it toward a particular objective. Many
times when I’ve had a hard day elsewhere, I just want to
go out and be in the dog lot. Then I feel better."

Dee Dee has faced her share of hard days. In 1996 she and her
husband almost died in a traffic accident. Then in 2002, she faced
her greatest challenge yet during a visit to her doctor.

"The first thing he told me was that it was malignant and
we had decisions to make," she recalls.

Dee Dee was diagnosed with breast cancer.

"I ended up with a double mastectomy," she explains,
"and it was in my lymph system. I mean, I was horrified at
first, and then I wasn’t. I thought, It’s OK. I’m
in good shape. It won’t be a big deal. I’ll just get
this chemotherapy and get it over with. I really didn’t
have any idea how devastating chemotherapy is. I’ve had
back injuries, I’ve had problems in the past, but all those
were single events and then you get better. Every time you go
to the doctor, it’s to hear how much better you are doing.
Cancer is a whole different journey. Every time you go to the
doctor, you get sicker.

"Although it’s a miracle what the medical community
has been able to do for us," Dee Dee continues, "it’s
still a pretty barbaric treatment system. The ravages that it
had on me physically and mentally have been huge.

"I had made a decision that life, feeling the way I felt,
wasn’t worth living. I was so frustrated because I was really
in a bad situation and I couldn’t get myself out of it.
I needed help."

Only three weeks after finishing chemotherapy, Dee Dee ran the
Iditarod, an 1,150-mile race.

Her reason for not sitting out a year, as she explains, was "because
nothing I had done but be with the dogs was any fun. Everything
I had done that last year, the last nine months had been miserable.
The only thing that brought any pleasure to my mind was my dogs."

Dee Dee has the added bonus of a supportive church.

"My church has really been awesome. That family has been
amazing," she says. "They did come around me and they
were really good about just checking, just caring. I really didn’t
like being out in public. On the other hand, going to church might
have been one of the only things I did want to do, because that’s
a really safe environment. We really are a hospital for sinners
and broken people."

Though the doctors say she isn’t out of the woods yet,
Dee Dee has seen God use her illness to touch people’s lives
around the world.

Media exposure like her appearance on ABC is something that Dee
Dee welcomes.

"I don’t mind that platform, if you will, because
it’s an opportunity to further the gospel, to further healthy
lifestyles, to perpetuate something that I feel very strongly
about – taking care of the temple we were given," Dee
Dee says. "I’m a pretty broken temple. That’s
what I’m trying to help kids understand is that just because
something isn’t easy for you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t
do it. I think one of the things that I have appreciated about
Iditarod is that it has given me the confidence to fight the harder
battles."

Through the good times and the bad, Dee Dee has learned the importance
of believing that everything happens for a reason.

"You know, it’s funny," she says. "I don’t
understand the people that don’t see the advantages to having
God in their lives today, not just in eternity, because if you
have the adventuresome spirit that I was blessed with, where you
want to climb the next mountain because it’s higher, and
you’d like to dangle from the next rope because the valley’s
deeper, and, in my case, I want to take the next dog trip because
it’s going to be in a more challenging environment, I’m
in over my head a lot of times. It’s only by God’s
grace that I’ve been able to face what it is that’s
in front of me and take that challenge on."